Dad, Israel, Palestine and me

Jacob Stone

Another world: Former Israel premier Ariel Sharon (right) during the Arab-Israeli war in October 1973, which changed the lives of those in the kibbutz.

The recent war in Gaza was another reminder of my family's link to the history of conflict in Israel and the occupied territories.

In 1973, a year after my idealistic mother and father moved to Israel to join the kibbutz movement, they were caught in the Yom Kippur war.

Our contemporary experience of Israel, the media coverage of modern day Gaza and the airstrikes and rockets, sits in almost direct contrast to the strangely sunny memory that dad had of his time there, even during the war.

We are reform Jews, and not particularly a religious family. My sister Elana and I were both encouraged to study for bar and bat mitzvah - the coming-of-age ceremonies for liberal Jewish boys and girls. My sister Yael did not. Although we had the little blue and white collection box for Israel in the house, I've always been critical of Zionism.

After a lifetime of arguing the point with Dad, I wanted to revisit some of his stories to see how different his perspective on Israel was and is, and to compare the wartime mood in the country and abroad nearly 40 years ago.

My parents emigrated to Israel in that climate of naive excitement and social optimism. My mother converted, and my parents married there.

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Dad says: "I graduated in 1970, and going away and working in different parts of the world was a thing; a cultural exchange Israel was promoting. I believed in that lifestyle.

"We arrived in December 1972. Our kibbutz was called Givat Haim, and had about 1200 people. It's a farm or settlement near Netanya - an hour north of Tel Aviv. We came to study Hebrew, and it was such a nice environment, we decided to stay."

A copy of LIFE magazine among Dad's clippings extols the 'Spirit Of Israel' brightly, and kibbutz manifestos earnestly discuss 'fundamental socialist values' and 'personal equality and equality of labour'. It's an optimistic take on the newly minted nation.

In 1972 Israel was recuperating from the 1967 Six Day War and beginning to squeeze Palestinians within its internal borders more tightly. The Western media supported Israel, feeling it deserved a run after beating the coalition of Arab Nations in 1967's Six Day War.

Seen from a modern perspective, the kibbutz movement casts a longer shadow. There are shades of Israel's settlement programs and a passively colonial tone amid the socially progressive language of Dad's magazines and books from the time.

There's a gap between sending mujahideen to Syria and sending some orange-pickers to Tel Aviv, but the intention is the same on some level – to support the growth or defence of a new nation.

"Israel got the benefit of tourists going there. Our Kibbutz had been set up by Jews of a German background. Families of original settlers, farming oranges and selling orange concentrate. Initially we were picking oranges.

"We moved up, and Judy worked as a nurse in a hospital. I worked in the architect's office at the central facility in Tel Aviv, travelling in at 5am with a couple of guys. We worked on new extensions."

The kibbutz movement functioned as a complicated social addition to ongoing colonisation by Jewish immigrants. Despite the fierce internal politics of the region, my father's insulated environment on the kibbutz meant that he didn't come into contact with anti-Israeli sentiment, or even hardline Zionists very often.

"Honestly, I didn't see that. There were some Israelis who went to war because they were crazy and thought they could act out their aggression. They weren't the kibbutzniks I was with and they'd have been ousted."

Peace in the country had been very fragile since the 1967 Six Day War. When my parents travelled outside the kibbutz to take a day off, the tension between the local Palestinian population and Israelis was palpable.

"We'd go on day trips - take the car and drive somewhere we could swim. There were local people, and I was very conscious of being careful."

Despite the tension, my father and mother even visited Hebron, a major Palestinian town in the West Bank near Jerusalem. In the current climate Hebron is completely inaccessible to Jewish civilians.

"I travelled to Hebron in the West Bank, before it became as violent as it is now. It wasn't blocked off, but it was pretty aggressive. I didn't speak the language, and the guys with me were all ex-army. We walked through and saw historical sites.

"There were kids there who would offer to mind your car, and you'd give them a few dollars not to smash it up. We had no guns, and were dressed as civilians. There was an aggressive tone, as they could tell we weren't Arabs."

In late 1973 during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, Israel was attacked by a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria. The Arab nations were motivated to regain ground lost in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, which had been captured by Israeli forces during the 1967 Six Day War.

During the war, my father and mother were sequestered with the elderly and civilian population on the kibbutz, about 50 kilometres from the frontline with Jordan. They weren't expected to fight, but their peers on the kibbutz were sent directly into combat.

Israel was almost overrun. Jordan remained relatively neutral, and after 19 days of fighting Syrian and Egyptian troops, Israel emerged the victor, taking territory and firming its tightly controlled borders in Gaza and the West Bank.

"I recall driving soldiers to the front. I had a car, and the front was about 30 kilometres away, so I offered to take people. It was at the border of Jordan, but there wasn't a fight with Jordan. It was a fight with Egypt."

I thought it would have been a dangerous drive, but Dad disagreed.

"It's like me saying to you that it's dangerous riding a motorbike."

I don't ride my scooter through war zones much, though.

"We heard planes, but didn't see the combat. You could hear it in the conversations being had by the soldiers.

"They were crazy. It wasn't even native-born Israelis, but in some cases guys that were there two years and wanted to go to war. This gung-ho American guy left his dog and his wife, and was happy to go. They were Zionists. It's not something I'd do.

"The mood during the war changed when they found they were gaining ground. I wasn't nervous, because the Sinai desert was five hours away. In a jet, it was nothing, but it was a tank war."

My parents worked on the kibbutz, and things took on a surreal tone.

"We dug trenches and taped windows in case of blasts. There were older guys who were really blasé about the whole thing, standing in the trenches up to their stomachs, holding umbrellas, like in a Fellini film.

"We didn't feel like there was an imminent threat, because the situation was so foreign to us. You heard planes flying supersonically overhead, and we watched the news every night."

The impact of the conflict was felt on the kibbutz, mostly in the families who lost relatives fighting in the conflict.

"The woman that Judy worked with at the hospital lost two sons. The second was a commander who had left to fight before the war became news. When we came to the kibbutz we were allocated a 'grandparent'. Our 'grandparent' lost his son.

When Judy and I married over there, his wife gave Judy her ring."

In the 40 years that have passed since the 1970s, my father has noticed the shift in the Western world's sympathies away from Israel.

My father isn't really what you'd call a Zionist, but he's the child of Second World War survivors whose experience of Israel was much more supportive.

"In the '80s Bob Hawke, then president of the ACTU, was a friend to Israel. There was publicity given to USSR for not allowing its Jews to express their religion, and Hawke spoke up for them and their right to emigrate.

"Yasser Arafat was gathering support as the head of the PLO, but people in the Western world were not as critical of Israel's right to exist as they are today."

I wanted to know whether, in continuing the tradition of kibbutz during the '60s and '70s, Israel had twisted the socialist ideals of my father's generation to suit its settlement mentality.

His answer reminded me a bit of his '70s copy of LIFE magazine - it was idealistic, complicated and somehow ignored the Palestinian question entirely.

"Jews had been moving into Palestine before Israel had been given its independence, prior to the First World War. Your grandfather moved there to escape from the fall of Imperialist Russia, and there was a greater movement as the Second World War was approaching. The early settlers lived communally, it was safer to do so.

"The kibbutz movement was transitional - it was a survivalist ideal, and a good defence in its early history. In the '70s Israel was open to volunteers, and it was a popular movement at the time."